In both countries they frequently mistook me at first for a common sailor in charge of a yacht, for my dress told no more. As intercourse proceeded it was curious to watch the gradual recognition of the fact that this “sailor” talked and thought not just the same as others. Then they regarded me as an agent come to sell the pretty boat; but it was in England only that any of them could be made to believe that the owner of the Rob Roy “would not part with his boat, did not want a cook or cabin-boy, and was not at all anxious to see the end of his voyage.” Sometimes the conversation, begun as between equals, would gradually get the word “Sir” sprinkled over it; and once or twice—and this not in France—it came down at last to that “glass of beer,” sheepishly enough asked for, which of course instantly drowns the converse that has been free on one side and independent on the other.
“Workmen,” “working men,” “artizans,” or whatever they are, or whatever you may call them—I mean the class now being spoiled by petting in England—let them be told (perhaps it may be said plainest by their best friends) that there are just as many proud exclusives among them as in any other stratum of society, and that they have at least a full share too of conceit, foppery, and affectation.
It may be heresy to say so, but the “horny hand” has no necessary connection whatever with the “honest heart,” as is the fashion to assert on one side, and almost to believe on the other; and the friend who really does shake that hand with a brotherly feeling is the most likely and the best entitled to refuse to talk popular nonsense of this sort about the “people.”
For the night we stopped usually in towns, but once or twice we rested in a great bend of the river where the steamer was run straight into the trees and made fast ashore exactly as if it were on the Mississippi and not on the Seine.
That thousands of solitary fishermen should sit lonesome on the river was the same puzzle to me as it had been before in canoeing on other French streams. Their silence and patience, during hours of this self-inflicted isolation, were incredible for Frenchmen, fond as we at first think all of them to be of “billard,” café, or dancing puppies, of anything, in fact, provided it assumes to be lively.
One thing I am at last decided about, that it is not to catch fish these men sit there; and the only reasonable explanation I can find of the phenomenon is that all these meek and lone fishermen are husbands unhappy at home!
There are numerous sailing-boats and rowing-boats on the Seine; but I did not see one that there was any difficulty in not coveting—their standard of marine beauty is not ours. All rigs and all sizes were there, even to a great centre board cutter, twenty-five feet broad, and any number of yards long, in which the happy yachtsman could sail up and down between two bridges which bounded him on either side to a two miles’ reach!
The French national flag is perhaps the prettiest on the world’s waters; but as it is repeated to the eye by every boat and building, the sight of it becomes tiresome, and suggests that absence of private influence and enterprise so striking to an Englishman in every French work. Then again their sailors (not to say their landsmen) in very many instances do not even know our English flag when they see it, our union-jack or ensign flying free on every shore.
At first I used to carry the French flag as well as our British jack out of compliment to their country, but as I found out that even in some of their newspapers the Rob Roy was mentioned as a “beautiful little French yacht,” I determined that that mistake at any rate should not be fostered by me, so down came the tricolour, and my Cambridge Boat-club flag took its place.
In one reach of the river we came upon a very unusual sight for a week day, a French yacht sailing. Her flag was half-mast high, and she was drifting down the stream, a helpless wreck. A distracted sort of man was on board, and a lady, or womankind at least, with dishevelled locks (carefully disordered though), the picture of wan weary wretchedness, and both of these hapless ones entreated our captain to tow their little yacht home. But, after a knowing glance, he quickly passed them in silence, and another steamer behind us also rounded off so as to give the unhappy pair the widest possible berth. Perhaps both captains preferred English sovereigns to French francs.